Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Bill Green -- Introduction: Understanding and Researching Professional Practice / Bill Green -- Understanding Professional Practice: A Synoptic Framework / Stephen Kemmis -- The Primacy of Practice and the Problem of Representation / Bill Green -- Practice without Theory? A Postmodern Perspective On Educational Practice / Wilfred Carr -- Rethinking ‘Experience’ in Professional Practice: Lessons from Clinical Psychology / Benjamin S. Bradley -- Moral Judgement and Practical Reasoning in Professional Practice / Robert Macklin -- The Practice and Praxis of Professional Decision-Making / Joy Higgs , Lindy McAllister and Gail Whiteford -- Blind Faith? the Mathematics of Decision-Making within the Professions / Tom Lowrie -- Research as a Pragmatic Practice: Unpredictable Means, Unforeseeable Ends / Della Fish -- Researching Context as a “Practiced Place” / Sue Saltmarsh -- Researching (from) the Standpoint of the Practitioner / Jo-Anne Reid and Bill Green -- Contributors / Bill Green -- Index / Bill Green.

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Understanding and researching professional practice is crucial both to enhancing the quality of professional learning and to improving professional education more generally. Yet professional practice remains something that is little known, theoretically and philosophically, despite a longstanding interest in what might be called the meta-field of professional practice, learning and education. The contributors to this book, drawn from fields such as education, allied health, psychology and business, explore different aspects of practice in the professions, professionalism, and research. This includes engaging with the burgeoning literature on practice theory and philosophy, including the increasingly influential neo-Aristotelian tradition, and taking account of growing interest in practice thinking across contemporary scholarship. It considers issues such as the primacy of practice, the nature of professional judgement, the role of ‘experience’, ethics, context, and the practitioner standpoint. As such, it raises important and timely questions about practice ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, and also praxis and politics. This is especially needed in a context otherwise increasingly organised by neoliberalism, economic rationality, anxious managerialism, and what some see as a general drive towards de-professionalisation and new nuances and intensities of regulation.